LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

The Santa Anas are up. There’s an ill wind blowing all across the United States. A few days ago, it touched down in Presidio Park, where taxpayers started dumping more tea in Boston Harbor.

I’m the guy who stood in back of UA’s grand ballroom for two solid hours holding my “Nearly free as possible” sign.

Let me tell you about hard times.

When a student takes a day off from his $7.25 an hour job to protest the tuition surcharge, that’s hard times.

When another student has to hold down two jobs (leaving no time to study), that’s also hard times.

This tuition increase is not new business, it’s old business.

For seven years now, the Board of Regents has played the taxpayers and students of Arizona falsely.

The Arizona Constitution gives them no authority to raise the tuition beyond “nearly free as possible.”

Alexander Pope once wrote: “To break a butterfly upon a wheel.” Well, the butterflies are broken.

The wine press is turned down so tight that the slight trickle of wine is beginning to look like blood.

The students have nothing left to give, not a spare morsel of flesh.

Meanwhile, the Board of Regents, and UA, ASU and NAU presidents have made a shameful mockery of our state constitution.

They’re playing with fire, and if they continue on their present course, they’re going to get burned.

If the stones could cry, they would.

Michael J. Beisch

O roamers, where art thou? Galleries beckon

Since the economy took a tumble, art galleries, as well as museums, have seen a significant drop in attendance.

The public should be aware that one of the secrets of fine art is that it can be enjoyed without spending any money.

Most museums offer either free admission or a modest entry fee, and every art gallery is always free.

An entire family can enjoy an afternoon together visiting art galleries and reaping uplifting inspiration for the adults and cultural literacy for children.

Gallery visitors become more aware of the finer points of the culture, and this gives a family quality time together talking about art and discovering the different kinds of beauty artists have created, a lot of fun for no cash.

So get hold of a gallery guide and make a trip to the art world for your friends and family while still holding on to your wallet. Children are always welcome in good galleries as long as their parents are well-behaved.

Mike Dominguez

Central Tucson Gallery Association

Somali pirate will have richer life in America

Bringing this Somali pirate to New York for trial is a brilliant idea. But we need to make sure that, once he’s in prison, he gets to send letters to his buds back in Somalia.

“Is good to be in America. I spend days watch the TV and learn how to play basketball. Food is good and I get three meals a day, not like home where once a day I got rice. Showers with hot water, too. Plus trip to America is free. Just surrender. See you when you get here.”

Once the pirates in Somalia find out what a good deal it is to surrender, they won’t even bother hijacking freighters. They’ll sail right up to our Navy ships and turn themselves in.

D.J. Sobey

Oro Valley

Global warming piece draws heated response

The Citizen’s increasingly left-wing orientation and placement of opinion columns on the front page, where many people mistake agenda-driven diatribes for news, are outrageous.

Your April 20 editorial was the last straw (“New hopes for environment under Democratic rule”), saying “no one can deny (the Bush administration’s) anti-science, pro-business approach.”

You support this by noting the Bush administration “even bucked a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2007 that greenhouse gases must be regulated” and that the EPA was finally free to report that carbon dioxide endangers public health.

This turns science on its head. Carbon dioxide – i.e. animal breath – is essential for life to exist on this planet.

We wonder why the jurists on the court – all well-known physical scientists – forgot to include water vapor, a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, in the EPA’s purview.

More than 31,000 men and women with degrees in one of the physical sciences, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s, have signed a petition saying anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are not a serious problem and do not significantly contribute to global warming.

Evidently, according to the Citizen, these people are anti-science.

By the way, mean temperatures have been cooling for the past five years owing to reduced solar irradiance.

Stephen R. Brown

Oro Valley

Get Congress to switch to cleaner energies

We should be developing industries that do not jeopardize our health, natural resources and economy.

It is time to expand wind, water and solar energy before other nations leave us behind.

Congress should be pressured to increase development of new energies and to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

Carol Masuda

Our Digital Archive

This blog page archives the entire digital archive of the Tucson Citizen from 1993 to 2009. It was gleaned from a database that was not intended to be displayed as a public web archive. Therefore, some of the text in some stories displays a little oddly. Also, this database did not contain any links to photos, so though the archive contains numerous captions for photos, there are no links to any of those photos.

There are more than 230,000 articles in this archive.

In TucsonCitizen.com Morgue, Part 1, we have preserved the Tucson Citizen newspaper's web archive from 2006 to 2009. To view those stories (all of which are duplicated here) go to Morgue Part 1